Walter Moss: Trying to figure out exactly what the United States should do in international situations is often complex and difficult, and we average citizens without expertise need to be sufficiently humble.

Rich Broderick: The ISIS horror show currently on display in Syria and Iraq is yet another consequence of Europe casually divvying up the Middle East without regard to the region’s ethnic or sectarian realities.

Munir Moon: Since the American public does not have an appetite for sending any troops to Iraq, American soldiers are being sent there as so-called military advisors. Isn’t this how we got started in Vietnam?

Dan Bluemel: The mistaken war wounded tens of thousands of American soldiers and killed nearly 4,500 of them. Though no official total exists, it is estimated by many that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed as a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation.

W. D. Ehrhart: As I watch events unfolding in Iraq over the last weeks, I find myself wondering if Iraq War veterans are feeling the way I felt in March and April of 1975 when the fiction that was South Vietnam collapsed like a house of cards.

Joe Palermo: The neo-cons brought the country the Iraq war and we should remember that fact, particularly since it appears that these dead-enders have burrowed themselves so deeply into the foreign policy establishment their bullshit views are still widely ventilated.

Marianne Williamson: It happened in Vietnam. Now it has happened in Iraq. How many times will we allow people to die in wars about which the planners of the war say in retrospect, as Robert McNamara did about Vietnam, that it was “a terrible mistake”?

John Peeler: The American people (aside from a few neoconservative hawks) are not prepared for a permanent reoccupation of Iraq, and that is what it would take to stabilize the country. We’ve been there, done that.

Joseph Palermo: Today, once again, it feels like we’re being herded into supporting a military action in Syria that will end up, like the Iraq War, making the world an even more dangerous place than it is now. Then, as now, we see influential journalists tripping over themselves to fall into line.

Paul Gipe: As the country continues struggling with the moral dimension of its action in invading Iraq, what has become clear is the staggering cost to future Americans and the opportunities forsaken here at home.

Wellness

Carole Bartolotto: The problem with concluding that GMOs are safe is that the argument for their safety rests solely on animal studies. These studies are offered as evidence that the debate over GMOs is over. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Environmentalism

Walker Foley: Elected officials seem to think there’s only one side of this property rights argument. The people who live in these communities have rights too, but the oil companies seem to have the jump on [the politicians’] side of the fence.